No Kenyan, No Cry: Obama and the Filmmaking Fringe-Right Conspiracists

As the election heats up and anti-Obama messaging proliferates, a new film, Dreams From My Real Father, argues that Obama’s pop wasn’t Kenyan, but an African American member of the Communist Party USA.

In presidential election years ugly abounds, as exemplified by 1988’s Willie Horton advertisement and the concerted Swift Boat Veterans’ attack on John Kerry in 2008. This year, a chunk of ugly is being delivered in the form of a pair of conservative documentaries. One, Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016: Obama’s America -- in which he argues that President Barack Obama’s Kenyan father inspired Obama to embrace anti-colonialist, anti-American views -- has become the highest grossing conservative documentary in box office history, and the second highest grossing doc after Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

The other documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception, takes ugly to another level. And although Gilbert’s has done nothing notable at the box office, it may, due to an apparently well-funded project aimed at delivering it for free to hundreds of thousands of Ohioans, affect the outcome of the election. Despite being ignored by most of the mainstream media, People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch pointed out that the film “has had a remarkably wide reach. In September, the New York Post ran a full-page ad [titled “Obama’s Big Lie Revealed”] for the movie…. [and] World Net Daily reported that Gilbert has sent 1 million copies of the film to households in Ohio and plans to send 1 million more out in swing states. Gilbert and [Swift Boater Jerome] Corsi both fault the mainstream media for ignoring their film, which Gilbert claims they’re doing ‘because they support national health care.’” Where Gilbert is getting the money to send all these free DVDs remains a unknown. Gilbert’s film implies that both D’Souza and the Birthers, (who claim Obama wasn’t born in this country) are totally off base. Obama couldn’t have adapted his Kenyan father’s views, because, Gilbert charges, his father wasn’t Kenyan. Obama’s Marxist worldview, Gilbert argues, was inherited from the man who was Obama’s real biological father, Frank Marshall Davis, an African American journalist, poet and member of the Communist Party USA.According to Gilbert, the 97-minute film narrated by an Obama impersonator -- produced by Highway 61 Entertainment and directed by Gilbert – maintains that Davis was Obama's “real father, both biological and ideological, and indoctrinated Obama with a political foundation in Marxism and an anti-White world view.”Gilbert goes after the public’s perception that Obama is “a nice man with an inspiring family story”: “Now, it seems likely President Obama intentionally hid a deeply disturbing family background and a Marxist agenda. If this is true, he is no longer likeable.”The film’s director has string of credits, including such films as Atomic Jihad: Ahmadinejad's Coming War and Obama's Politics of Defeat (2010), and Farewell Israel: Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam (2008), Bob Dylan: Revealed, Elvis Found Alive and Paul McCartney Really Is Dead. He is also a contributing editor for FamilySecurityMatters.org.People for the America Way’s Right Wing Watch recently reported that “In a National Press Club appearance this summer, Gilbert expanded on his theory, claiming that Obama and strategist David Axelrod were both ‘red diaper babies,’ born of communist parents to carry on the cause; that Obama is pursuing Davis’s ‘dreams of a forced imposition of a classic Stalinist-Marxist agenda upon America at home and abroad’; and that Obama worked with ACORN to cause the subprime mortgage crisis as part of a plan to ‘use minorities and the poor to collapse capitalism.’”According to a transcript of his National Press Club appearance, Gilbert maintained that Obama’s election “was not a sudden political phenomenon. It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that Frank Marshall Davis nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the US economy, universities, and media for decades.”Gilbert went on to make a number of accusations against most of the mainstream media, leftist news sites, and at least one conservative news site, for “gross violations of the Journalists Creed.” He accused the news divisions of ABC, NBC, and CBS network “of violating the public trust by refusing to cover” and “ignoring” his film; MSNBC of a “vile campaign of lies and misrepresentations to protect … Obama’s false narrative”; Newmax.com “of censorship and suppression of the news”; all leftist website-based news organizations of intentional bias…”; and “all the main stream print media … of intentionally suppressing the truth about … Obama’s history and agenda.” Interestingly enough, Gilbert’s imaginings relegates much of the theorizing of D’Souza, and the stuff the Birthers {Donald Trump, former Swift Boater Jerome Corsi, Alan Keyes, Orly Taitz, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, et al) have been peddling over the past several years to the dustbin of history. Taitz, a pioneering Birther, is particularly miffed at Gilbert and Corsi: “Jerome Corsi is destroying the case on which I worked for 4 years 24/7/365. He is gratuitously making up an American father for Obama. What is his motivation to do so? Tell WND and Corsi to stop this,” she wrote on her website. As of this writing Gilbert’s film hadgarnered 122 customer reviews at Amazon, of which 82 reviewers have given the film 4 out of 5 stars. Coincidentally (or not), many reviewers are using similarly crafted statements: “It's time Americans woke up to the fact that the Communist Party USA has bamboozled us with a fake president” (26 reviewers); “Having just watched Dreams From My Real Father everything in this film makes sense and explains why Obama will go to any and all tricks to get re-elected” ( 22 reviewers); and “Joel Gilbert has uncovered the truth about Obama's concealed past in Dreams From My Real Father" (16 reviewers).